hich
would have given a much better nickname to your quartier du bord: you
should have called it Gascony.

"Sooner than strike we'll all ex-pi-er
On board of the Bell-e Pou-le."

Such fanfaronading is very well on the part of Tom Dibdin, but a person
of your Royal Highness's "pious and severe dignity" should have been
above it. If you entertained an idea that war was imminent, would it not
have been far better to have made your preparations in quiet, and when
you found the war rumor blown over, to have said nothing about what
you intended to do? Fie upon such cheap Lacedaemonianism! There is
no poltroon in the world but can brag about what he WOULD have done:
however, to do your Royal Highness's nation justice, they brag and fight
too.

This narrative, my dear Miss Smith, as you will have remarked, is not a
simple tale merely, but is accompanied by many moral and pithy remarks
which form its chief value, in the writer's eyes at least, and the
above account of the sham Lacedaemon on board the "Belle Poule" has a
double-barrelled morality, as I conceive. Besides justly reprehending
the French propensity towards braggadocio, it proves very strongly
a point on which I am the only statesman in Europe who has strongly
insisted. In the "Paris Sketch Book" it was stated that THE FRENCH HATE
US. They hate us, my dear, profoundly and desperately, and there never
was such a hollow humbug in the world as the French alliance. Men get
a character for patriotism in France merely by hating England. Directly
they go into strong opposition (where, you know, people are always more
patriotic than on the ministerial side), they appeal to the people, and
have their hold on the people by hating England in common with them.
Why? It is a long story, and the hatred may be accounted for by many
reasons both political and social. Any time these eight hundred years
this ill-will has been going on, and has been transmitted on the French
side from father to son. On the French side, not on ours: we have had
no, or few, defeats to complain of, no invasions to make us angry;
but you see that to discuss such a period of time would demand a
considerable number of pages, and for the present we will avoid the
examination of the question.

But they hate us, that is the long and short of it; and you see how this
hatred has exploded just now, not upon a serious cause of difference,
but upon an argument: for what is the Pasha of Egypt to us or th